Security giant Symantec was forced to fight fires at the weekend after users took to the web to complain that an update to Norton Internet Security was causing Internet Explorer 11 to crash.
Web user ‘Sunfox’ took to the official Norton Community forum on Friday evening with the following message:
“Running NIS on Windows 7 Pro 64-bit with IE11 (latest updated). Sometime this evening, IE11 started crashing. In fact, it crashed an already-open browsing session, and now trying to start it up just instantly causes a ‘Internet Explorer Has Stopped Working’ error.”
After uninstalling NIS, IE11 began working again “like normal” – leading the user to deduce that the Norton product was to blame.
A stream of comments followed, all detailing the same situation.
To its credit, the firm took to the forum the next day to announce that the issue had been fixed.
“Kindly run manual live update (right click on Norton icon on tray notification area > 'Run live update '),” wrote Norton employee ‘Nikhil_CV’.
“Kindly stop using work-arounds.”
Symantec then received some online praise for its efforts.
“Just did another update and the issue with IE 11 is fixed,” wrote ‘Win8InFL’.
“Now THAT's what I call turnaround time. Congratulations to Symantec, and Kudo's [sic] for the fact that these forums are actually looked at by the company, unlike those of some other manufacturers.”
There’s been a worrying trend of late for updates which end up causing more problems than they solve. Microsoft is one of the prime culprits, with users disrupted after installing security fixes released during this month’s Patch Tuesday.
Update KB2920732 was originally released to improve stability, reliability and usability in Powerpoint. However, once installed, some users found that it actually broke the presentation software.
Microsoft was also forced to reissue Visual Studion 2010 patch KB3001652 after widespread complaints from users that it was affecting computers.
In addition, the firm had to make KB3001652 temporarily unavailable after it reportedly caused font corruption.